I recently heard a story,
it was the story of the person who told it to me, but it struck me
that it was also  many peoples’ story.  There was much to celebrate
in the story, and also a lot to be frustrated by.  The person who
told me the story was someone who lacks access to sufficient
financial resources.  That is, in the colloquial – he is poor –
although I think poverty is more complicated than that!  The man is a
father, and his daughter got into a VERY good college, despite the
challenges the family faced and the challenges their school district
faced.  As you might hope, the very good college offered this young
woman a financial aid package to make it possible for her to attend
the school.  However, when the young woman got the financial aid
package and read it over carefully, she realized that the loans she
was being offered were predatory loans that would be verging on
impossible to ever be able to pay back!  She contacted the school.
They ignored her.  She kept pestering.  They kept ignoring her.  Her
father started calling, and he started calling up the chain of
command.  He was told to stop calling.  When I heard the story,
that’s where it ended – they were unsure if the young woman would
attend the very good college because she was WAY too smart to do so
at risk to her financial future.

She sounds like the
persistent widow.  I’ve been told that the persistent widow is a very
strange character with which to start a sermon series on subversive
women – and not just because the Bible presents her as fictional.
The bigger issue is that her subversiveness isn’t very obvious.  To
the naked eye, she just looks like an annoying nag!  Actually, even
that may be projection.  This is a SHORT story, there isn’t that much
to it!  

In our study of the text
though, we found a lot to discuss about this short-storied,
fictional, persistent widow.  It is helpful to remember that the
Torah, the laws of community life that the Jewish people understood
to have come from God, were very clear about the care for widows,
orphans, and foreigners.  That would be, people who did not have the
protection of an adult male who was a member of society and were thus
vulnerable.  The system was designed so that even the vulnerable
could find ways to survive.  The Torah was also very clear about the
threat to society created by an unjust justice system, and
articulated frequently, in no uncertain terms, the need to have
judges who made rulings based on JUSTICE and not on who had more
money or influence.  

That is, the persistent
widow is stuck in a situation she shouldn’t be in.  She should be
cared for.  She isn’t!  It is likely that her “opponent” is the
person who should have been taking care of her and providing for her
livelihood, and wasn’t!  The justice system was supposed to help her
find a way to justice.  It didn’t.   She was stuck in a situation
which was untenable for her survival without a means of recourse
because of the immorality of the judge.  There was no other means by
which she could get justice.  The system was closed to her, and the
only option left to her was to agitate the system.

The judge is presented
very simplistically.  He doesn’t care about justice, people, or
God… and it sounds like he just does what he wants to do.  He is a
negative caricature of a person abusing power or authority, someone
who isn’t easy to move toward justice.

The persistent widow won
though!  I suspect that she could have taught the courses I took this
spring on non-violent direct action!  Jesus says that the judge
thought to himself,
“because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice,
so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.” (v. 5) The
persistent widow didn’t have much power to use in the world, and she
didn’t have ANY power that could be used without being annoying.  So
she used what she had.  She was annoying.  She didn’t give up.  And
she annoyed him into doing what was right!  

That’s
what I think is so subversive about the persistent widow.  She can’t
have been the only widow in that city who was impoverished by a lack
of justice, she likely wasn’t even the only one to bring it to the
judge’s attention.  MANY of the widows might have been in similar
situations.  However, in cases like that, most people give up.
That’s what people are counting on, and that’s part of why injustices
sometimes win out.

I
think about that young college bound woman, and how carefully she
read the details of her financial aid package to determine that the
offer wasn’t fair.  How many other people in the same situation come
with some trust that the college they want to go to won’t do them
harm, don’t read the package, or don’t yet have the math skills to
interpret the implications?  How many people would decide to take the
package and hope for the best?  How many people would try to call and
ask if there was another loan, but give up easily?  I don’t know how
many people would get as far as the young woman I heard about, and
consider giving up their dream school, but I do know that her
persistence is NOT what the predatory loan company is counting on.

The
predatory loan company is expecting people not to pay attention, to
trust, to take a leap of faith, not to run the numbers, and to sign
on the dotted line – no matter how high the interest rate turns out
to be.  The predatory loan company is able to get away with their
loans because few people are as persistent as that young woman. The
college, as well, choose to work with that predatory loan company,
and in doing so to keep this young woman and those in similar
situations IN poverty, while pretending to help them out of it.  It
makes me wonder what they might be getting out of it.

Keeping
our eyes open to see
the injustices of the wold and REFUSING to be quiet about them once
we do is wildly subversive.  I’m claiming the persistent widow was
subversive because she was a nag, and she didn’t stop nagging until
justice was found.  It isn’t the wildest story in the Bible by any
means, but it may represent the most frequently successful mechanism
of accessing justice: refusing to give up!

One
of the challenges of acting like the persistent widow, though, is
that there are a lot of injustices in the world and none of us can
give attentiveness to all of them.  That level of nagging can’t be
multi-tasked!  This is one of the reasons I am so grateful for the
image of the Body of Christ.  I come back to it time and time again,
reminded that if I do my part faithfully, and trust the rest of the
Body to do their part (and God to do God’s part), the whole world
gets better.  Most often justice comes through collective action
(think Montgomery Bus Boycott, Women’s Suffrage, blocking the
Keystone XL pipeline), but sometimes they’re smaller or individual as
well.  On occasion we can successfully seek justice alone, but no one
of us can seek ALL justice.  If any of us try to
all the work of the Body of Christ, nothing gets done
at all!  

My
college thesis was on John Conway’s “Game of Life,” which is a
set of rules governing a grid.  On the grid, at any given moment,
each cell is “alive” or “dead” and then, from there, things
change.  The status “alive” or “dead” is represented visually
by two different colors, and those statuses are able to change with
time, based on the relationships they have with other cells who are
also “alive” or “dead.”  

One
night, deep in the trenches of trying to write up my thesis and
struggling with a decision about where to go to seminary, I went down
to the river to pray.  I sat on a dock and watched the water flow by.
As might make sense if you’d spent as many hours and months staring
at colored boxes on a graph as I had, I started imagining the river
as the graph – and imagining the graph spreading out to cover all
the water of the world.  I’d stared at colored boxes for a LONG time,
and I was tired 😉  Then, as I continued to pray, ponder, and be
overwhelmed, I started imagining one of those boxes as representing
MY life.  To my horror, the box that represented my life was
blinking!  I took this to mean that sometimes my life was
contributing to the well-being of others, but sometimes it WASN’T!  I
found myself sitting on that dock on the Connecticut River, aware
that sometimes I wasn’t benefiting the kin-dom of God and wishing
with all that I was that I could ALWAYS be good.

It
was at that point that another thought entered my mind, one that was
outside of the particular ways my thoughts tend to cycle around.
That process has been one I’ve associated with the Divine, and I have
since thought of that prayer time by the river as a vision of sorts
-but I’m also giving you the details to consider it so that you can
assess how you’d like to think about it.  The thought that entered my
mind, seemingly from beyond me, was that if I could manage to be a
blessing that contributed to the well-being of the kindom 51% of the
time, that was ENOUGH for God to be able to expand the goodness out
into the world and to be a net gain to the kin-dom.  

It
was certainly a new thought to me then, I’d leaned more towards
perfectionism than toward an idea that offering more good than bad
was a net gain!  It is a thought I’ve gone back to in the years
since, particularly when I’ve found myself being extra rough on
myself.  It helps me to consider that God is able to make things work
with what we’re able to offer.

If
we do our best, and especially if we are able to offer a bit more
good into the world than harm, then God can use what we offer in
combination with the rest of the Body of Christ.  The world becomes a
safer, fuller, more just place.  The kin-dom becomes.  We don’t have
to do all the work!  We can’t!  We’d burn out.  That means that
sometimes we have to work through the process of figuring out which
things are ours to do and which things we leave for the rest of the
Body of Christ.  Together, each of us offering the love, compassion,
and persistence that are our gifts from God, we can follow the
widow’s course and create the world that the Torah dreams and God
wants – the kin-dom of God!  And it doesn’t even require perfection
😉  Just persistence.  Thanks be to God.  Amen

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hershttp://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

October 2, 2016